The Need for Rewards
The need for rewards has three components: recognition, profile, and status. It is important to have others acknowledge your work, to maintain a positive image, and to have an important role in an organization. More than anything, what distinguishes leaders driven by their need for rewards is the desire to receive recognition for their competence and achievement, sometimes even a kind of heroic status. As with the components for competence and achievement, these factors can play out as extreme and overly ambitious, or moderate and appropriately ambitious.
Recognition
When you take recognition to its extreme, it’s very important to you to be acknowledged for the work that you do. You often put yourself in high-profile situations to ensure that you will be recognized, and in doing so, you strive to make sure other people are aware of your good work. You don’t see yourself as showing off; you are just making sure people know of your accomplishments.
In its moderate form, you want to be well known and well liked, and you feel good when that happens. You also remind yourself of the underlying accomplishments that brought you that recognition and consistently strive to have the work speak for itself.
Profile
When you take your concern for profile to its extreme, your image is very important to you and you work hard to maintain it, sometimes without the accomplishments to back it up. From the clothes you wear to the people you want to be seen with, you carefully orchestrate the message you want others to receive about you.
In its moderate form, you enjoy a high-profile challenge but do the homework and follow-through necessary to earn the acknowledgement associated with the project or job. Your image is important to you, but you want to look good based on your hard work.
Status
When you take the desire for status to its extreme, you are very concerned with levels and chains of command within an organization. It’s important to you that others acknowledge and respect your position. You work hard at maintaining your status within the organization, and you immensely enjoy the perks associated with your status.
In its moderate form, you are conscious of your status and work to make sure others do not see you as too directive. You recognize the impact your status can have on the flow of information, and you enjoy the perks of your status and share them with others. You work to engage individuals at all levels within the organization.
Using Exercise 4, examine your own behavior to determine whether your need for rewards may be causing you to be overly ambitious.
Let’s look at an example of how leaders with an extremely strong need for rewards might let the elements of recognition, profile, and status affect their work.
Sam was recently put in charge of the company’s marketing and sales function. He is charged with maintaining a strong but steady growth rate and market share while entering a key new market. Sam might be tempted to react in the following ways:
• Announce his plans to enter the new market personally, publicly, and with great fanfare.
• Take every opportunity to magnify and keep his efforts in the corporate eye, milking others for compliments and congratulation.
• Spend a large part of his time overseeing the creation of public displays of his individual and group progress, in publications, speaking, and electronic media.
• Save for himself opportunities to present to the board of directors and influential groups and individuals.
• Be extremely involved in the project’s visible stages but leave the everyday grunt work to others.
• Keep track of and secure the perks of his position for himself: the best office, privileges, and status symbols.
• Speak directly with only certain members of his organization on terms he deems appropriate, and always maintain his status as the leader.
If Sam can’t manage his extremely strong need for rewards, it could result in his not sharing information. Individuals below him in the organization may resent and disrespect him. He may never really understand the actual work that is being done and therefore not be able to effectively manage it. There may be a sense of haves and have-nots within the organization.
Exercise 4: The Need for Rewards
Highs and Lows
Think of the last time you felt elated by receiving an external reward, and the last time you felt down when failing to receive recognition.
• What did the high feel like?
• The low?
• How would the middle ground feel different?
Status
Can you remember a time when you kept score of whether you were up or down with respect to symbols of status and public profile?
• Why were these things important to you?
• How did they make you feel?
• What would you lose without having them, or gain by obtaining them?
• What about the limelight attracted you?
• What did you enjoy about your own reaction? What did you enjoy about the reactions of others?
• Did you sometimes feel idle or unproductive during the downtime between public successes?
• If so, what was missing that impacted your productivity?
How the Need for Rewards Affects Your Work for the Organization
This guidebook isn’t suggesting that you not promote yourself. Rather, you should not promote yourself exclusively. As with the other drivers of ambition, the need for rewards is not negative in itself. Without self-awareness, however, it can contribute to excessive ambition and lead to derailment. If you promote yourself solely and excessively, others are likely to resent you. By being willing to share the glory, you often put yourself in a better light with others.
Strategies for Managing Ambition Driven by Rewards
If you believe you are powerfully motivated by the need to receive recognition, and you are concerned about being seen as overly ambitious, consider the following strategies for managing that need:
• Work to delay the gratification that comes with success until you have achieved your goal, instead directing your focus and that of your team on intermediate performance goals.
• Couch your performance and that of your team in the context of organizational goals, not individual and group goals.
• Spread the opportunities to take credit for the work of your group among members of the group, not just for yourself. Make it a conscious part of your schedule.
• Involve yourself in not just the glamorous parts of the work but also the everyday routines that make success possible.
• Keep yourself and your group focused on agreed-upon goals which lead to success, showing by example that the symbols of success do not matter.
• Share the perks and privileges of your role with your team.